


Silence Fallen

by KethriHolmes



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-08
Updated: 2014-05-08
Packaged: 2018-01-23 23:25:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,789
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1583240
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KethriHolmes/pseuds/KethriHolmes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alone in a cold, concrete corner sits a young woman, her knees pulled up to her chin and arms wrapped around them. Her red hair is stringy and unkempt. Her black eyes are bottomless and staring and her skin is pale and sallow from too many years locked up without quite enough food. Her arms and legs and face are covered with scars where she scratched tally marks into her skin with her fingernails. She mutters under her breath, “I can’t forget I can’t forget I can’t forget,” the same thing over and over again as she rocks back and forth, staring at the ceiling, staring at something that nobody else could remember…</p>
            </blockquote>





	Silence Fallen

Alone in a cold, concrete corner sits a young woman, her knees pulled up to her chin and arms wrapped around them. Her red hair is stringy and unkempt. Her black eyes are bottomless and staring and her skin is pale and sallow from too many years locked up without quite enough food. Her arms and legs and face are covered with scars where she scratched tally marks into her skin with her fingernails. She mutters under her breath, “I can’t forget I can’t forget I can’t forget,” the same thing over and over again as she rocks back and forth, staring at the ceiling, staring at something that nobody else could remember…

Kenna sat straight up in her bed in a cold sweat. Her bright red hair hung around her pale face. She’d had one of her nightmares again. They always had the same creatures in them, the ones that she could never remember when she woke up, and the crack that she was always looking through. It’s an eerie feeling, constantly waking up terrified of something but not being able to remember what it was or why you were afraid of it. It was something on the edge of her memory, just a fading dream.

Kenna looked at her alarm clock and sighed. Five-thirty. Not enough time to really go back to sleep. By the time she calmed down enough to sleep, it would be six o’clock and her alarm would be going off, telling her to get up and go to school. Next semester, she decided, she needed to plan her classes better. No one in college should have to go to class at seven o’clock. It was ridiculous. Why did they even have classes planned that early? Most other colleges didn’t start until at least eight.

Getting up to open her laptop, which was sitting on her desk, she was stopped dead in her tracks by the sight of a creature – the monster from her nightmares – hanging off the ceiling. But she looked away for an instant and didn’t even remember it being there. She shook her head, trying to get rid of a sneaking suspicion that there was something she was forgetting to remember.

She went on her computer and saw that there was a video message waiting. This wouldn’t have been concerning except that the message was from herself, two hours ago, when she had supposedly been asleep. Thinking that maybe her roommate might have put it on there to remind her of something, she opened the message. But when the video came up, it was her on the screen. She was looking at herself, who was looking up at the ceiling. A fuzzy, incomplete memory flashed through her brain.

She looked at the title of the video. Please Watch it said. She didn’t know if she wanted to. What had happened to her that she couldn’t even remember? Had she been sleepwalking? She had never done so before. More likely there was something else going on and she didn’t think she wanted to know. Ignorance is bliss. Not being able to decide, she minimized the window and shut the laptop before getting up to get ready.

She went through the day in a haze. She had no focus for anything because her mind kept flicking back to the message. How had she left a message without remembering? What did it say? She didn’t really want to know, but she knew that she would have no peace until she did know.

As soon as her last class was over, Kenna rushed back to her room. “Are you okay?” Her roommate, Piper, asked when Kenna ran in and desperately grabbed her computer.

“I’m fine,” Kenna answered quickly, opening the laptop and moving to her individual room in the apartment. Whatever the message was, she probably didn’t want Piper to know. If it was her sleepwalking somehow, she’d never hear the end of it. If she was going crazy, she definitely wouldn’t hear the end of it. And if it was important…well, she would cross that bridge when she came to it, if she came to it.

Kenna hit the play button and her own voice came through the speakers. Hearing your own voice was weird in any circumstance, but what she was saying just increased the bizarrity level. “You’re not going to remember this when you wake up,” the virtual Kenna started, “But you have to believe me. You have to believe yourself. Those dreams you have, the ones about the monsters that you can’t quite remember – they’re real. The monsters are real. They’re all over the place, everywhere I go. I’m looking at one right now. But I can’t look away. As soon as I do, it becomes a forgotten memory. And as soon as I see another one, I remember everything clearly. I don’t know why. But there’s one thing I’m sure of,” she continued. “One has been watching me all my life. Whenever I look up, I see it there, watching. If you, the version of me watching this, was to look up, you’d probably see it, too. You may already have done this but just don’t remember it. I’m going to keep making these video diaries so that maybe together we can find out what’s going on here. I have to go for now but try! Try to remember.” And with that closing statement, the message stopped and the play button appeared again, back at the beginning.  
Kenna sat back in her chair, putting her hands behind her head and looking up. And that was when she saw it. Again. For what was probably the hundredth time. A monster with a wrinkly brown face and an open hole for a mouth and wearing a suit. What kind of monster wore a suit?

She reached over to her computer, not looking down, and opened up the camera so she could take another video. It was just a good thing she knew her computer so well. “It’s still there, just watching me,” she whispered after it had started recording. “It doesn’t seem to have a moveable mouth, so it never says anything. It never tries to attack me, but I don’t think it can. Otherwise it would probably try to stop me from making these videos. Not being able to remember it afterwards is probably some kind of defense mechanism. I…” Right at that moment, she heard Piper calling from the kitchen that dinner was ready. Kenna, without thinking, glanced away to answer, looking away from the creature. Looking back, she saw that her camera was recording. Kenna stopped it, wondering desperately what she had said in it. But Piper called again and Kenna left the room. She would watch the video later to find out what happened. 

Every night, Kenna and Piper traded off who was going to cook dinner. Tonight was Piper’s night. But something was determined that Kenna not enjoy her meal. She just had time to sit down before she doubled over in pain, clutching her head. She could vaguely hear Piper yelling something in the background but all she could focus on was the feeling of her brain being frozen and then shattered into a million pieces. Images flashed through her head. It had happened before – snippets of the lives of people she never knew – but it was getting more frequent and more painful. This time she was looking at a red-haired little girl in her room, watching her through a crack-like screen, the same one from her dreams, the one that she saw her visions through. But it didn’t seem the girl could see Kenna like Kenna could see her. Finally, after what seemed like hours but was probably just a few minutes, Kenna faded back into reality. She had somehow ended up on the floor.  
“Are you okay?” Piper asked as she sat up, still rubbing her head.

Kenna nodded. “Yeah, I’ll be fine.” And with that she got up and sat back in her chair, where she was supposed to be.

Later that night, as Kenna was sitting on her bed, trying to do some homework, an image popped into her mind and she felt the need to draw it. Her pencil was moving faster than her brain, gliding across the page. When she finished, she just sat there and stared at it. For the first time, she recognized and remembered the creature that had haunted her all her life.

Quickly, she ran over to her computer and played the message she had left for herself earlier. In doing so, she had forgotten completely about the drawing. She played the message and sat back, thinking. They weren’t trying to hurt her…it didn’t make sense. Why was it here? Confused but tired, Kenna crawled into bed. The drawing slipped onto the floor, blank side up.

The next day Kenna was walking to class when she was stopped dead in her tracks. Up above her, hanging off the high ceiling of the administration building, was a cluster of the creatures. She counted six in total. How many of them were there? How many had she seen n her lifetime? And how many times had she walked past them, seen them but not remembered? And now she knew that, once she looked away, she wouldn’t remember them. She thought about the drawing and her dreams. Something in her subconscious was trying to remember, but it didn’t always work. She needed some way to know when she had seen one. She reached back behind her, to her backpack, where she had a mini-Sharpie™ clipped. Without taking her eyes off of the creatures, she wrote on her hand Remember and six tally marks.

When she looked down, it was like the markings had just appeared on their own. “Remember…” She whispered and shrugged. Her memory had always been wonky. She’d remember or she wouldn’t. That’s how it had always been for her, like she could sense that pieces of her life had been pulled out of place, but she had no idea where they went. Sometimes they came back, sometimes they were replaced by the memories of people she never knew, and sometimes it was her but she looked older. It was kind of hit-and-miss. Maybe all those things, too, had something to do with these strange creatures.

Another couple of markings appeared, one in a set of two and the other in a set of four. Still, she had no idea what it meant. Remember. Remember what, exactly?  
There was another on her message on her computer when she got back to the apartment, this time from just a minute before.

“It seems that, if you look at one, you remember every one you’ve ever seen and what happened while you were looking. Like, looking at the one on the ceiling, I can remember that, earlier today, I started marking with a Sharpie™ every one I saw. These creatures are everywhere. I know because sometimes, even when I’m not looking, I can almost remember them. Always there, always watching.” Kenna had a sudden flash of images through her head – dreams mostly forgotten, things almost seen, figures in the shadows.  
The message ended there. Kenna sat in silence for a moment. She glanced down and saw that three new marks had appeared on her arms since she had gotten home. Slowly, she looked up, and in the corner of her room were three creatures instead of the one that was usually there.

“H-hey guys…” Kenna said tentatively, knowing that they wouldn’t answer back. She remembered trying to talk to them before, but they had never said anything back.  
With a start, Kenna woke up. She was no longer in her room and the walls, floor, and ceiling that surrounded her were solid concrete. It was a huge room but she could tell it was a prison because there were no doors or windows. The only light was a couple of bare light bulbs, one at either end of the long room, so she could see how far it stretched, but not how tall.

Feeling unsafe in the center of such a large room, Kenna started backing up slowly until she hit a corner and slid up the wall. Her hand hit a switch and lights flared in her face, blinding her for a moment. When her vision cleared, she gaped at what she saw.  
The ceiling was completely covered with the creatures, the same face repeated over and over again, all of them staring down at her. Kenna reached behind her to where her marker usually was but felt only concrete. Her backpack was still at home, sitting at the foot of her bed. But she would forget! As soon as she looked down, for whatever reason, she would forget how much danger she was in, which made the situation all that much more dangerous. She had to find a way to keep track, but in the meantime, all she could think was I can’t forget I can’t forget I can’t forget.

. . . . .

Somewhere else in time and space, a man in a tweed jacket and bowtie was running around the console of an odd ship, pushing buttons and pulling levers. It seemed random to the outside eye, but he knew what he was doing…mostly. Sometimes there were small miscalculations here or there, but he was getting better. It didn’t help that the ship had a mind of its own.

This time he was headed for Earth, a place that was a personal favorite of his and currently housed his two best friends who he often went to visit. However, the ship, called the TARDIS (Time and Relative Dimension in Space), hit a rough spot and got knocked around a bit. Things started falling, including a handy piece of psychic paper that had been sitting on the console. When the steering had calmed down a bit, the Doctor went to pick it up but paused mid-motion. Flashing across the page, written over and over again, was the same phrase: I can’t forget. Every so often there was a location intermixed with the words – latitude, longitude, time, day, year. Good old psychic paper.

“Up for a side-trip?” He asked the TARDIS. His running increased as he frantically moved to change the ship’s direction mid-flight. The ship vibrated across time and space, headed towards Earth, which was where he had been heading before, just not the same time or place. Very nearly, though.

The TARDIS landed and out stepped the Doctor into a big, empty chamber. “Hello!” He called out. His own voice echoed back to him. “I’m the Doctor!” I’m the Doctor. “I got your message!” …message… He looked around but it didn’t seem like anyone was home. Maybe he’d gotten the wrong address. It wouldn’t be the first time. But what he did know with extreme certainty was that someone, somewhere, was in trouble. It took a great amount of mental focus to send a message to the psychic paper across time and space. It couldn’t just be done on a whim. Whoever had sent the message was concentrating really hard.

He turned back to the TARDIS, thinking that he needed to park somewhere else but he was distracted by his hand and one glance at it told him he was in the right place. Written on the back of his hand was a set of four tally marks. Slowly, he turned back around. There, in front of him, were four Silents. The Doctor had met them before. They were part of a religious order called the Silence whose purpose was to kill him before he could become too dangerous. And they were memory proof – once you looked away, it was like they had never been there at all.

“Hello, I’m the Doctor,” he said again. There was an awkward pause as they just looked at him. “I don’t suppose it was you who called me.” Still nothing. “Didn’t think so.” He was about to keep rambling on when a flash of movement at the edge of his vision caused him to make the mistake of looking away. When he looked back, the only evidence in his mind that anything was wrong was the four marks that were still on his hand and the fact that he didn’t remember turning around.

“Well, I’m definitely in the right place…” he mused, scanning his surroundings. There was a door at the other end of the room and the logical thing to do when you see a door is go through it, right?

On the other side of the door was a set of stairs. He looked over the rail; the stairs seemed to go on forever. But something important, very important, was at the bottom, he just knew. And so the running began. Always with the running. He was in great shape from all the running around he always did.

Counting the floors as he went down, he got to the bottom landing of the 130th floor. In front of him was another door. Out of breath, he pulled it, only to find it locked. He leaned against it heavily, out of breath as he fumbled in his jacket for his sonic screwdriver. The door clicked open and he fell through it into a large concrete room that was brightly lit. His eyes zoned in on a figure at the other end and his hearts broke. Sitting in a corner with her knees pulled up to her chest and her arms wrapped around them was a young woman with flaming red hair that looked like it hadn’t been washed in a long while. From where he was standing, he could see that she was injured, and that was enough to make him barrel across the room, heedless of any other danger.

Coming up to her, he knelt down but even then she never lowered her eyes, which were fixated on the ceiling. She was muttering under her breath something he couldn’t quite make out.

“Hello,” he said softly. “I’m the Doctor.” There was no response. She wasn’t even really blinking. It was unnatural. “What are you staring at?” He asked slowly, turning his head to follow her unwavering gaze. The answer was suddenly, painfully very clear.

“Oh dear,” he breathed. Keeping the ceiling fully of Silents in his peripherals, he lifted up the girl’s arm to get a closer look at the scratches that he had seen on her face, neck, and arms from across the room. She snatched it back almost immediately, but before she did, he got a glimpse of the tally marks etched into her skin.

“I’m going to get you out of here,” he whispered, “But you’re going to have to trust me.”

“Who-who are you?” It was the first time the girl had spoken. Her voice was hoarse, as though she hadn’t spoken a word for ages.

He reached back with his hand until he found hers. “I’m the Doctor. And what’s your name?”

“K-Kenna.”

“Well, Kenna, I’m getting you out of here. Everything is going to be alright.” Which could very well be a lie, but this girl looked like she needed all the hope she could get. “Do you think you can walk?”

He couldn’t tell if she responded, but when he held back his hand, she took it and he stood up, pulling her with him, a little shakily but holding her own. As soon as they stood, the eyes of every Silent in the room honed in on them.

“Suppose this time you just let us go,” The Doctor suggested with a cocky smile. The Silents started dropping to the floor in front of them, advancing with their long, awkwardly graceful limbs. “Didn’t think so. Thought I’d ask.” He gripped Kenna’s hand tighter. “Run!”

The Doctor took off, Kenna stumbling along in his wake as they dodged back and forth between Silents. It was obvious that Kenna hadn’t run or probably even stood in a long time, but at least they didn’t have to worry about trying to keep their eyes on the creatures. It was hard not to see them when they were everywhere, pressing in from every direction.

“Well, this could be a problem,” the Doctor said as he turned in a circle and only saw Silents. “What do you even want with her?” He yelled over the top of them. It was a question that had been bothering him since he had first seen Kenna in the back of that long room with Silents watching her every move. Why? Why had they not just killed her? They had all the necessary skills and had proven capable of killing.

One of the Silents came forward, tilting its head from side to side. “Because she remembers,” it said raspily in the Doctor and Kenna’s heads. Kenna looked over in surprise. They had never spoken to her before, if speaking is what that could really be called. 

“Remembers?” The Doctor asked. “Remembers what? Oh!” And then it clicked in his head. What else? What else could the Silents, so worried about being memory-proof possibly want to keep hidden except for someone who remembers. “She remembers you. Oh, that’s brilliant. That is just absolutely fantastic. You’re scared of her, all you big bad Silents, because she can remember you even after she looks away. And you can’t have that, can you?” But then his great mind, gears always clicking and whirring, came up with another question. “But how? How does she remember?” He asked, more to himself this time than the Silents. He looked slowly back at her. “What makes you special?” Kenna looked like she was about to answer when suddenly he shouted, “Look out behind you!”

Kenna swiveled to see a Silent breaking from the circle and coming towards her. There was pure terror on her face. The Silents had obviously not been kind to her, and it made the Doctor increasingly angry as time went on. His attention was distracted, however, when suddenly the floor opened up in front of her and a white light engulfed the Silent and several others that were unlucky enough to be nearby. They simply disappeared. The Doctor glanced down at the floor and saw, to his surprise, the Crack. The Crack in the skin of the universe that had followed him for so long, that he thought he had finally gotten rid of when the TARDIS exploded...but where had this one come from? They didn’t usually just appear out of nowhere like that, almost on command. 

He looked around and saw the other Silents pulling back, leaving an opening for them to get through. There would be time to think about the Crack later. “Come along, Kenna,” he called, grabbing her hand again and taking off. Her eyes seemed more glazed over than they had been before, but she could at least still move, so he was going to keep moving.

At the moment, Kenna was in a completely different place, in another one of those strange non-memories, this time of a kitchen, all quaint and yellow. It was just like the last and only other time that she had, had willed a crack to appear. That time she had seen what looked like an old war room from a history textbook about World War II.

The pair burst through the door at the bottom of the stairs, the Doctor slamming and locking it. “Come on, keep going!” He encouraged, grabbing her hand again and starting for the stairs. “That door won’t hold them for long.” 

By the time they got to the room where the TARDIS was waiting, Kenna was falling over on the floor, not sure she could move a step further. “Just a little bit more,” the Doctor said, helping her up. “We’re almost there, I promise.” Together, they stumbled through the door.

The Doctor immediately found Kenna a seat; she looked like she was about to pass out. “Do you need anything?” He asked. Kenna’s eyes were fixed on the door. “Don’t worry, they can’t get through that door. We’ll be long gone by the time they get up here.”  
“Then I’ll have some water, if you have it.”

The Doctor nodded and took off, taking a loop around the console and flipping some switches and pushing some buttons, pulling some levers, telling the computer to get them out of there immediately before going to get some water for Kenna.

When he came back with it, he settled himself down across from her. “Where are we going?” Kenna asked.

“Earth, I believe. I just wanted to get out of there as quick as possible.” The Doctor paused. “So, I hate to ask you this now, since you just got out of there, but how did you end up there in the first place?”

Kenna rested her water in her lap and took a deep breath. “If I’m going to tell you, I guess I’m going to have to do it right. Because it really started when I was about four, and if I start anywhere after that, the story won’t make any sense.

“When I was four, there was a crack in the wall of my house, right in the hallway. Nobody seemed to notice it but me. It was like it was staring at me every time I walked past. One time, I looked back, and I was something through it, a strange creature that didn’t make any sense. But I was drawn to it. So I reached through the crack and touched it. Apparently I was knocked out for two days after that, and when I woke up, I didn’t remember at all. Actually, after that, I couldn’t really remember anything properly. Sometimes I couldn’t remember things that happened to me. Usually when that happened, it was just a hole in my memory. But other times that hole was filled with people and places that I didn’t recognize and had never seen before.

“As I got older, it got worse, and my senior year of high school, I started getting sudden headaches that were always accompanied by a vision of some other life, except that unlike the memories these ones were seen like I was looking through a crack. I didn’t realize it then, but the crack was always the same shape as the one that had been on my wall.

“Then, five years ago, when I was in college, I started to remember things I shouldn’t. I started to remember those creatures, the monsters. It started with dreams and then I started to remember them when I was awake. That’s when they took me, when I started remembering.” Here she stopped to take a drink.

“Wait, five years ago?” The Doctor asked.

“Yeah. I had been in there for about five years. At least, I think that’s how long. I think I might have skipped a day or so in my counting, but I tried to be as accurate as possible. Keeping track was the only thing keeping me sane.” She looked down at her scarred arms.

Inside, the Doctor was fuming. Five years! She had been in there for five years, and he couldn’t help but blame himself. He had a time machine! He just couldn’t seem to land it in the right time or place when it mattered most. But he pushed that down, straightened his bowtie, and said, “So, now that you’re away from the Silents, where would you like to go?”

Kenna thought for a moment, sipping her water. “I’d like to go back to Earth,” she said finally. “Those creatures - the Silents, you called them? - they’re everywhere. And if this is what they’d do to me, who knows what they do to people who aren’t special? Although I don’t exactly know why I am. I want to something to help, to find a way to fight them.”

The Doctor’s hearts glowed with pride. “You humans, always so resilient, always bouncing back and moving on. You’ll do well, Kenna, I’m sure you will.” He jumped up so that he could land the TARDIS.

He dropped Kenna back off on Earth, present time from when she was rescued. She found out that she had been declared dead long ago. But that was good. She took on a new name, and started S.U.A.T.S. - Stand Up Against The Silence. To most, it was just a crackpot organization fighting ghosts, and Kenna was the only one who truly knew what was going on at all times, but it was her way to doing something to protect the Earth she loved.


End file.
